In November, I halted a rehearsal and walked out.

My choir was preparing for our winter concert at Chicago's Symphony Center. Thousands would attend the two performances. But the singers really struggled with Samuel Barber’s haunting “Agnus Dei,” which was to accompany huge overhead photographs of loved ones that our singers and staff had...Read more

SAN DIEGO — Light rain slicked the pavement in San Diego's East Village neighborhood on a recent morning, forcing some homeless people to scatter while others huddled under tents or slept through the drizzle.

I was on foot with Dr. Aaron Meyer, a psychiatrist frustrated by California's most visible crisis: The failure to provide help for ...Read more

Strikes by public employees aren’t good for the taxpayers, but they sure can be revealing.

This month, teachers in the San Francisco Unified School District went on strike. They wanted a 9 percent raise over two years and more funding for their health care plan. If those demands sound familiar, they should. No matter the rhetoric that ...Read more

It takes two to tango — and to reach a compromise.

The federal government’s Valentine’s Day deadline for an agreement on the Colorado River has come and gone. The seven states connected to the river failed to reach a deal on future water allocation. They also missed a deadline last November. Previous agreements will expire at the end of ...Read more

At 84, I am an analog guy in a digital world. Sure, I do Zoom meetings and check my smartphone too often. Yet my mental health suffers, I swear, from the almost vertical rate of societal change; political mayhem; transition from a human to digital-dominated world, and the sense that Big Brother’s cameras know my every move.

Stop the world, I ...Read more

The decline of California’s kelp forests since the marine heat wave of 2013-17 has seen only minor recovery despite heroic efforts at restoration carried out by scientists, fishermen, coastal tribes, volunteer divers and conservationists. Nor is the threat to kelp localized. Rather the loss, like the expansion of mega-wildfires on land from ...Read more

MINNEAPOLIS -- A Nobel Peace Prize for Minneapolis? I say heck yes, knowing full well that this immodest boosterism is darn near heretical in Minnesota.

Politeness is hardwired into the North Star State. We famously don’t take the last doughnut in the box a colleague shares with the office. “That’s interesting” is about the worst we’...Read more

The Supreme Court’s decision invalidating President Donald Trump’s tariffs sends a clear and crucial message: The justices will not be a simple rubber stamp approving presidential actions. In the first year of Trump’s new term, 24 challenges to presidential actions came to the court, almost all on its emergency docket. In 22, the justices ...Read more

On Thursday morning, I awoke before dawn to the news that Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the former prince, had been arrested in England on suspicion of misconduct related to his ties to Jeffrey Epstein. I immediately thought of the late Virginia Roberts Giuffre, the brave survivor of Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell’s sex trafficking ring, who’d ...Read more

SAN FRANCISCO — It was speed dating: Eight suitors with less than four minutes each, pitching the woo to thousands of Democratic Party faithful.

The race for California governor has been a low-boil, late-developing affair, noteworthy mostly for its lack of a whole lot that has been noteworthy.

That changed a bit on a sunny Saturday in San ...Read more

In the United Kingdom, former Prince Andrew was arrested Thursday on suspicion of misconduct related to his ties with Jeffrey Epstein.

“The law must take its course,” King Charles, Andrew’s brother, said in an official statement to the country, reinforcing the importance of the rule of law in the U.K.

What about here, in the United ...Read more

Not surprisingly, the Supreme Court on Friday struck down President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariff agenda, ruling that the White House doesn’t have the authority to act unilaterally under the statute cited. The justices had signaled as much during oral arguments in November, when the solicitor general made the dubious assertion that the ...Read more

MUNICH — When Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, no one imagined Moscow would be enmeshed in a quagmire four years later, having lost nearly 1.2 million killed, wounded, or missing soldiers to an army a fraction of its size.

The price Ukraine has paid for its defiance was written on Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s face — weary, puffy, aged ...Read more

On the merits, the Supreme Court’s decision last week to invalidate much of the president’s global tariff regime is to be welcomed. Yet the court’s judgment, sound as it might be on constitutional grounds, can’t by itself undo the damage that America’s turn to protectionism has already caused — nor prevent worse to come.

Avoiding ...Read more

The Supreme Court’s decision to strike down President Donald Trump’s sweeping global tariffs is a loud wake-up call for Congress. If the legislative branch had been doing its job last year and hadn’t ceded its taxing power when the White House embarked on this unprecedented protectionist journey, perhaps we wouldn’t be in the mess we’...Read more

Can nothing stop President Donald Trump? Despite widespread opposition, Trump continues his blustering, unchecked by the usual guardrails of American politics. He’s attacking Venezuela, then threatening Greenland and sending federal immigration agents into American cities from Minneapolis and Portland to Chicago and Washington. His power seems...Read more

One of the most dangerous mistakes Americans are making right now is treating the threat to our democracy as a collection of daily outrages — the latest social media post, the latest threat, the latest norm broken. Those things are certainly bad, often stunningly so. But they are not the real problem. The real problem is structural, and it ...Read more

Illinois recently joined 11 other states in enacting a law that allows physician-assisted suicide. I propose an additional tweak that would make dying more humane for those who might like to let go a bit prior to the six-month window of legality that seems to be the standard.

The American way of dying has been evolving, which I think is good. ...Read more

If Americans want to make a clear assessment of the “Schitt’s Creek” level of intergovernmental cooperation these days, they need look no further than the mighty Potomac River and the flood of sewage that has inundated it.

Last month, a major sewage pipeline known as the Potomac Interceptor collapsed, causing at least 234 million gallons...Read more